[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvatore_Sanfilippo

And boy to the people making the decisions NOT want to hear that. You'll be dismissed as a naysayer being overly conservative. If you're in a position where your words have credibility in the org, then you'll constantly be asked "what can we do to make this NOT a quest to the top of Mt Doom?" when the answer is almost always "very little".

Even what you described (single lease, 4 roommates) is very common and usually allowed but the single lease part is what self-limits the impact of boarding-house type places. You need to find 3 other people to go in on this place with. You need to trust those other people and coordinate lease payments and utility payments and deal with it when some of them to decide to move on. That's a headache!

Also, I don't remember what model Copilot uses by default, especially the free version, but the model absolutely makes a difference. That's why I say to spend the $20. That gives you access to Sonnet 4 which is where, imo, these models took a giant leap forward in terms of quality of output.

1) Completely separate in your mind the auto-completion features from the agentic coding features. The auto-completion features are a neat trick but I personally find those to be a bit annoying overall, even if they sometimes hit it completely right. If I'm writing the code, I mostly don't want the LLM autocompletion.

2) Pay the $20 to get a month of Claude Pro access and then install Claude Code. Then, either wait until you have a small task in mind or your stuck on some stupid issue that you've been banging your head on and then open your terminal and fire up Claude Code. Explain to it in plain English what you want it to do. Pretend it's a colleague that you're giving a task to over Slack. And then watch it go. It works directly on your source code. There is no copying and pasting code.

3) Bookmark the Claude website. The next time you'd Google something technical, ask it Claude instead. General questions like "how does one typically implement a flizzle using the floppity-do framework"? "I'm trying to accomplish X, what are my options when using this stack?". General questions like that.

From there you'll start to get it and you'll get better at leverage the tool to do what you want. Then you can branch out the rest of the tool ecosystem.

BAD: Hey, you there?

GOOD: Hey, you there? I'm trying to do X but I'm running into some issues and I wanted to get your advice.

Once I've responded and you know you have my attention, then you commit to filling me in on the gory details.

I find two things to be distasteful: 1) Asking others to do the work you're uninterested in doing yourself and 2) the rejection of any kind of stylistic writing as an annoying distraction. I don't know if the person I was replying to is guilty of #2 but I've seen the sentiment a lot here and more frequently than I used to. Not everything is a technical manual that needs to convey its main ideas in as straightforward a way as possible.

This article is a work of art. And I don't mean that in the highfalutin sense. But the style is meant to evoke something just as much as the words themselves. It's fine if it that doesn't work for you, but the goal was not to convey as much meaning in as few words as possible.